The eyes of the world are currently not fixed on Canada, as so often. But some of the eyes in this country, and even outside it, are fixed on the race to see who will become captain of the shipwrecked HMCS Liberal as Canada’s former “natural governing party” goes under for what may be the last time. And a strong contender is former governor of our central bank and the British one, Mark Carney, currently a key economic advisor to outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and a self-proclaimed jet-setting multimillionaire Davos elite Harvard and Oxford graduate “outsider” who his main rival has dubbed “Carbon Tax Carney”. And while it may be a bit of an unfair test, it will be interesting to see the extent to which this former fanatic for Net Zero tries to run on combating climate change and whether the public, uh, warms to any such campaign. For once what happens here may really be an indicator of what to expect elsewhere as the Net Zero agenda unravels messily.
It won’t be easy for Carney to tiptoe away from the corpse of Liberal climate policy like, say, Bill Murray in an iconic scene from Caddyshack. And not least because of online posts like, say, the 2021 one from COP26 saying “Thank you @JustinTrudeau… for cont’d Canadian leadership on carbon pricing”.
Did they think his partisan foes couldn’t find it? Or discover that, at time of writing, his LinkedIn profile started:
“I’m the UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, and Chair and Head of Transition Investing at Brookfield Asset Management. At Brookfield, I lead the firm’s environmental, social, and governance investing strategy, with a particular focus on accelerating the transition to a net-zero economy.”
And in one of those weird Internet ghosts, the search result pointing to his LinkedIn page starts “Mark Carney is an influencer” though that term does not appear on the page. And what could be trendier than an “influencer”? Except perhaps a “lobbyist”, as Canada’s Conservatives not unreasonably ask how much he was being paid as “Chair of Brookfield Asset Management” while advising the Canadian government on policies directly relevant to its lobbying and business activities.
We don’t want to get sidetracked into the partisan maneuvering, from Carney posting a shot of himself skating on Ottawa’s iconic Rideau Canal to prove he’s just regular folks to the descent into nickname-calling that, arguably, owes much to the Liberals’ long-standing habit of making cheap-shot mincemeat of anyone who tries to beat them via the high road. As for his tendency to rub shoulders with suspicious characters, who among us doesn’t bump into Ghislaine Maxwell and Prince Andrew at chic globalist galas?
Or with important Chinese communists, a rather more troubling matter. But if self-government is anything but a fatuous error, then in some sense and over the long run vox populi must be vox dei rather than vox humbug, in the irritated words of William T. Sherman writing to his wife and also clearly the view of Xi Jinping with whom Carney has met to help boost the PRC’s trade.
As Conrad Black put it, after a genuine effort to clear Carney of some criticisms including his dubious social contacts while pillorying him for weak and politicized conduct as head of the Bank of England:
“More worrisome, given his political aspirations, are Carney’s emphatic and largely wrongheaded views of a number of other key issues. He is in favour of replacing the United States dollar as the world’s reserve currency with a synthetic currency; this would be like handing world monetary policy to the United Nations. Carney referred to the anarchistic Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011 as ‘entirely constructive’; he sees climate change and ‘net zero’ (carbon emissions) as a ‘huge economic opportunity’ rather than the wildly exaggerated and largely fraudulent subject of self-punitive economic damage that they are. He wrote that the Freedom Convoy of 2022 was an attempted ‘insurrection.’ And as a business executive, he is a militant proponent of ESG, (environment, social and governance), a faddish movement subject to expensive posturing, often used as a substitute for responsible and law-abiding commercial profitability. Mark Carney is a tired tribune of failed attitudes and misdirected political reflexes, a leftist reactionary still spouting the woke, ultra-green nonsense that has done such terrible damage to the West since the Cold War. Whatever his virtues, he is absolutely not what this country now needs as prime minister.”
Don’t mince words, Conrad. And thus while the next verdict of Canadians on the Liberal party, under Carney or anyone else, will involve a great many considerations, and may struggle to attract global attention, those Liberals certainly have been among the most vocal and persistent, if programmatically ataxic, of Western governments on the climate alarmist file so it will be of some interest.
In this regard it is noteworthy that two Liberal MPs who are not running for the leadership wrote an Op Ed about how the party might attempt to self-salvage that offered some centrist clichés on topics from national identity to defence to immigration to avoiding “silly nicknames” that didn’t once mention climate, carbon taxes or EVs at all.
It’s a bit much to hope voters forget the party ever cared about that silly old “carbon pollution”. But it will be an interesting choice whether to drop it from the platform without saying anything, keep it in without saying anything, drop it vocally or keep it vocally. And it will be fascinating to watch Carney, Chrystia Freeland and others try to squirm their way out of it.
Another aspect of Carney that is at once revealing and potentially distracting is that he is, like the last born aristocrat before Justin Trudeau to put the Liberals on the rocks, what the British call “a chancer”. Somehow his sincere beliefs at any given moment conform to the path upward, and he has never been caught advocating for something unpopular with the smart set in his life. Thus at Davos as recently as 2023 he proclaimed himself “a European” and “an Irish citizen”, clearly identifying as one of those cosmopolitan inhabitants of the galactic metropolis who is at once from anywhere (except Rubeville) and nowhere.
It doesn’t help that he’s “a member of the Group of Thirty, an international body of leading financiers and academics, and of the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum” and, for good measure, has attended three of the Bilderberg Group’s annual meetings. But now he’s a proud Canadian outsider, slavering to munch a beaver tail on the Rideau, who just happened to pre-announce his candidacy on a once-popular left-wing American comedy show because um uh well see that is to say…
In pursuit of more power he’s also using journalists he knows personally to sell himself as a “centrist”. But his record says otherwise, to the extent that it was anything but positioning. Back in 2021, at COP26 in Glasgow, he said “I see myself as part of the social movement” that Greta Thunberg led, and boasted of meeting with her several times as she “catalyzed that movement, the youth movement.” One wonders if he’ll invoke her now that she’s jumped the shark into Hamas-infested waters. (He didn’t know how to pronounce her name but how cosmopolitan can one man be?) And he launched the spectacular Global Financial Alliance for Net Zero that lured the gnomes in, wasted their time, burned their money and forced them to flee in disarray.
Want to run on that record, of zealotry and malfunction? But how can one not, with or without a derisive nickname liable to remind people that you were in fact very keen on the carbon tax until very recently? Also his 2022 book Values may turn out to be 2025’s Vamoose. For instance the bit where:
“The best approach is a revenue-neutral, progressive carbon tax. That is, the average proceeds should be returned to individuals so that incentives to spend on lower-carbon projects are in place but less well-off households benefit from rebates. The Canadian federal carbon pricing framework is a model for others.”
Oh that carbon tax.
Also, he’s on recent record in somewhat Bolshevik tones that:
“The companies, and those who invest and lend in them, who are part of the solution, will be rewarded. Those that are lagging behind, and are still part of the problem, will be punished.”
Here tossing a word salad is one standard trick. “When asked in French if he plans to lift the carbon tax to attract conservative votes,” the Calgary Herald reports, “he said if it is lifted there needs to be something in its place that is better if not more effective.” Better if not more effective. Politically if not um uh what?
Admittedly for a Canadian politician bilingual generally means equally evasive in English or French. But Carney still seems to be the “UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance”, a job he’s held since December 2019. And on September 18, 2024, after he joined the Liberals “in a special role that will allow him – at least for now – to go right to the heart of government decision-making without having to bother with all the issues around getting elected”, speaking of vox humbug, a column in the ultimate publication for Canadian political insiders, Hill Times, bore this headline:
“Carney’s advice to Liberals puts low-carbon future above all/ Mark Carney made it clear he will be doubling down on the need for the government and Canadians to move heaven and earth to build a low-carbon economy.”
Oh yeah? Care to explain how? Carney told chic leftist Jon Stewart on his Comedy Central “The Daily Show” that:
“The vast majority of our emissions in Canada come from our industry. In fact, almost 30 per cent of our emissions from Canada come from the production and shipment of oil to the United States… So part of it is cleaning that up, getting those emissions down, more than changing in a very short period of time the way Canadians live.”
Egad. More than not instead of? Very generous of you to let us lurch disgracefully on for a bit. Perhaps in a short period of time, or a moderate one. Just not a “very short” one. Also how, pray, does one reduce the emissions from producing and shipping oil to the United States, other than by not shipping oil to the United States?
Comedians tend not to drill into such matters, and neither do media outlets all-in on climate alarmism, especially if as in Canada they are also dependent for their survival on subsidies from governments also all-in on it. But Canadian voters may be curious to hear how he’ll get rid of the dreaded carbon without changing in a very short period of time the way they live, and dramatically for the worse.
P.S. It would be very interesting to see Carney’s flight manifest over the last year, or indeed since he became UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance.
In the global green theocracy, he sees himself as at least a Bishop or perhaps a Cardinal. In Canada he sees a kingdom for me and serfdom for thee. Let's hope his court media eunuchs fail in selling his "makeover".
Leftists everywhere are one trick ponies and they never, ever learn anything from failure!
From "sock puppet" to the "Carny" show. I hope the Canadian electorate of 2015 have learned a lesson and understand a Davos/WEF grey suit with now dented climate creds is no substiture for the real thing. Yesterday, Steven Guilbualt the Conservatis for giving the carbon tax a bad name. Helloooooo!
At least Kim Campbell,the "fall-guy" PM,briefly,during 1993 was elected MP years earlier by voters in her riding.This Carney Creep will probably become our PM with only the votes of Liberal Party members.I'll bet this limousine liberal never rode a bicycle to work like Climate Barbie did for a time,years ago.This guy is so full of it,and full of himself,even more elitist than Trudeau.But smarter.Can you imagine Trudeau trying to run The Bank of Canada or England?LOL
One way to reduce the carbon footprint of Canadian oil exports would be to use pipelines instead of railroad cars...
Marx Carnage is truly frightening in his zealotry.